The Rent Is Too Damn High: What To Do About It, And Why It Matters More Than You Think

Too many have bought into a perverse inversion of what the city should be. Cities are where wealth is created, not just where it is displayed. They are meant to be escalators into the middle class, not penthouses for the upper class. But through bad policy and worse politics, we are doing in the twenty-first century what we so feared in the ninetee

Public housing is not properly an end in itself. It can only be justified as a means to an end of making our cities fit places in which to live. What kind of public housing should it be?…The tenant’s rent should be increased with his increase in income and he should not be evicted as an over-income tenant. When his increasing rent reaches the point

the inexorable movement of real-estate capital into traditionally poor areas and can no longer afford what used to be affordable.